


taz fic: munch squad junior

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: wip amnesty hour, you either know what im gonna give you or you dont, youre either into what im selling here or youre not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: here is an archive of things too short to be posted on their own and things that the void(fish) atei ask for your kindness, your forgiveness, and i hope that i these amuse you somewhat in these trying times.featuring: taako gets un-voidfished early; taz wtnv 5 things; taz but its queer eye now; kravitz is the heir to the death throne, and many more.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 188





	1. taako gets unvoidfished early

**Author's Note:**

> you know how authors do a "wip amnesty hour"? yeah that. im not saying all of this is unfinished, but a lot of it is. and a lot of it is here so that i have it outside of tumblrs loving arms.
> 
> updated daily until i run out of backlog

**anonymous** asked:

Okay like holy fuck I really want an au where taako remembers early, like if the suffering game ended differently, he became a lich earlier, or instead of pringles sneaking into lucretias's office it's taako and he drinks the voidfish juice its such a fucking cool idea

#    


“Where’d he go?” Magnus asks, staring at the space above Captain Captain Bane’s corpse.

“No fuckin’ idea, my man,” Taako’s mouth says, and nobody but Taako knows that it’s not _Taako_ talking, but the Red Robe. Taako really wishes he could tell them, that uh, hey guys, it’s the Red Robe right here, taking over cha'boy’s whole just everything, but Spooky McSpookerson here is _awful_ good at imitating Taako’s cadence, at keeping an iron grip on Taako’s whole mental _thing._

_Sorry Taako,_ Asshole Ghostface thinks. _S'just for a bit, I just gotta get on the moonbase._

_Get out of here!_ Taako thinks. _This body is! One! Boy! Only!_

_I’ll be out of here in a bit,_ Jerkwad Bodysnatcher promises. _Just gotta pick something up._

Taako ain’t no fool, he _knows_ you can’t trust liches.

_Su-ure_ he thinks, all sarcastic as the Red Robe makes Taako follow his boys back to their transport back to the base. _Su-ure I can trust you._

#

Dickweed Fuckrobe makes Taako drink the weird juice from the tank on the Director’s desk and oh fuck, _Taako really can trust liches._

_Hey Barry what the fuck,_ Taako thinks, staring at the baby voidfish that’s materialized (what the fuck, Fisher had a kid? _Fisher could reproduce?!_ ) on the table, thoughts all banana blitzed _blenderized_ , because that’s a hundred years of history, that’s his sister, that’s a mission and a life and a—

_Don’t push yourself,_ Barry thinks, and now Taako _remembers_ that Barry Bluejeans and the Red Robe are one and the same, that Barry Bluejeans is his brother-in-law-best-friend, _You’ll scramble your neurons if you push it._

_Fuck my neurons,_ Taako thinks savagely, because there’s Magnus-Merle-Davenport- _Lucretia,_ there’s _Lup_ like a staccato hammerfall in his brain, how dare Luce get rid of his _sister_ , oh gods its like a whole gaping hole that he never noticed now filled, _he always had her_ , and he’s so angry that his hands are shaking, the umbrella in his grip getting hot.

_Okay,_ Barry thinks, all careful. _Okay, well, I don’t have a spare body for you, bud, so maybe don’t do that? Also, I’m gonna get us out of here, okay?_

_Whatever,_ Taako thinks, cause he’s all preoccupied with losing his _mind,_ and out of all the people he knows who are fond of possession, he trusts Barry the most. Lup would always draw on his face.

#

They run into Lucretia on the way out.

She doesn’t stand a chance against the two of them, and they blast their way out of the moonbase.

“I’ll explain everything later!” Taako yells on the way out to Maggie and Merle. “Maybe!”

#

“So this is Lup’s umbrella,” Barry says.

“And it was on her skeleton,” Taako confirms.

“And it’s supposed to vore magic…”

Taako looks at Barry’s skull. Presumably Barry’s skull looks back. He shrugs his red-clad shoulders. Taako rolls his eyes.

“Only one way to find out,” he says, and breaks the umbra staff over his knee.

_“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!”_ Lup yells, coalescing out of the crack, phantasmal and resplendent.


	2. some things about nightvale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ive wanted to do a taz nightvale au for a long time, but the timing's never right.

** blupjeans nightvale: a pitch **

The girl on the radio’s got a voice like starlight, which doesn’t mean anything except for the fact that Barry’s seen starlight now – piercing, bright, and beautiful.

Metaphors are only so metaphoric in Night Vale.

He heard her for the first time when he was driving in, when he hit the city limits in his van filled with Important Scientific Equipment. His radio fritzed for a second, and classic rock flipped into Lup’s voice, _hey babes welcome to Night Vale,_ and he hadn’t thought much of it until she had said _and the scientist in jeans has the cutest butt_ , and then he slammed the brakes, he was so surprised. He caused a traffic jam. He didn’t get a fine. Traffic jams are legal on Tuesdays (or they will be, until October).

He meets her at the press conference, and yeah, she’s got a smile like starlight too. 

** five moments in the amber seal that is nightvale's timeline  **

1\. there is nothing but noise in the desert. kravitz drives his van over the city limits and suddenly, with a pop and a hiss, the radio plays. W _elcome to nightvale,_ the host says, and he’s got a voice like nothing kravitz has ever heard, an accent he cannot place. 

2\. the radio host is named _taako_ , and he fixates on kravitz with a scattershot interest that is far from passing. _his beautiful hair, the charmingly morbid skull-shaped vitiligo crossing his face, the adorable way he wears a suit everywhere — doesn’t homeboy get hot? it’s the fucking desert!_ kravitz will be investigating the census records in the basement of city hall (armed with the requisite ritual scythe) and he will hear, _so the hot new guy, huh? what’s his deal?_

3\. the dog park is new. there used to be a neighborhood there but damned if anyone knows what happened to it. taako’s best friend (his nemesis, his on-air punching bag) is named magnus. he used to have a wife. don’t go into the dog park. it will not harm you. 

4\. there is a man in a red jacket whose face cannot be remembered. he hangs around the radio station a lot. he’s always wearing jeans, but that’s not particularly memorable — a lot of people wear jeans. kravitz wonders why taako is compelled to mention it. 

5\. taako pops in his old recordings and there are two voices hosting the show. One of them is taako. the other isn’t. 

**taakitz nightvale: a second act**

The stranger comes rolling into town in the soft twilight. The stranger drives a van with a battered exterior and rugged tires because he's heard things about the desert. He's an investigator by trade, that is to say, he looks into suspicious deaths. Suspicious amounts of deaths. He doesn't come alone — he's going to be joined by his colleague, his supervisor, in the next six months.

"Time might not work right," she's warned him. He thought she was kidding. Soon he'll know better.

But all that is in the future. For now, our stranger drives on lonely desert roads. He has a map detailing the rest of his journey. Turn left past the used car lot, right at the lights above the Arby's, next to the Big Rico's, park at the the building that he will call his workplace for the next year. That's when the lease is up, at least. He doesn't anticipate being here any longer. Why would he? He goes where he's needed.

The radio crackles to life as he enters the town limits. _Welcome_ , the voice says, in an accent that the stranger has never heard before. _To Night Vale._

The stranger adjusts his tie. He's wearing a suit, despite the late hour. It looks good against his dark skin. He's not unnerved by the radio, though it seems to be speaking to him specifically. It can't be. It's a local community station.

Then the broadcaster begins to describe his perfect hair, his high cheekbones. _His name is Kravitz_ , the broadcaster says, and Kravitz swears in surprise, because this is unprecedented. Unnerving. He thinks about turning the radio off. He's scared to turn the radio off. He turns at the used car lot.

Kravitz listens to the radio all the way to his destination. The broadcaster's voice is strange, but hypnotic. Kravitz imagines in another circumstance he would like it. But not when the broadcaster is harassing him over the air.

_And I fell in love, instantly,_ the broadcaster says, in a tone of voice like he's joking. Like he's deadly serious. Like it would be impossible to distinguish between the two. The broadcaster sounds like a man who is always laughing and therefore everything he says is completely true, completely lies.

Kravitz feels cold sweat down his spine. He wonders what he's gotten into, and turns his key, cutting the engine off. For a moment he just sits in the driver's seat. He wonders if he should turn back. Raven wouldn't hold it against him, if he explained the situation.

But he's never refused a job before. And Night Vale is the most forensically interesting town in America.

#

What Kravitz doesn’t know is that the radio is playing on all the stations in town. There is only one real show, the late-night show, though it doesn’t play late-nights., it plays mornings and afternoons and sunsets, it plays the aftermath of disaster, the real-time reporting of tragedy, it plays births and deaths and resurrections.

It plays on everyone’s stereo. It plays on the battered radio sitting in front of the house next to the car lot as Old Man Merle and Magnus Burnsides shoot the shit and drink beer. It plays on the smooth glass speaker sitting on the Mayor’s desk, as Mayor Lucretia signs documents. It plays on the tape deck sitting on the counter of the Goldcliff Garage and Auto Body Shop. It plays through the headphones that Angus McDonald, boy detective, wears as he hums and does his homework.

There’s only one show in town. Night Vale Community Radio News Hour. There’s only one radio host (Ren not included): Taako, who is currently reporting on the handsome stranger in town.

_The sun is hot, the moons are beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome… to Night Vale._


	3. taako doesnt get picked for the ipre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was a tumblr prompt :0

anyway so they never tell him but it was a choice between him and his sister and she’s always been the better outta the two of them, so she’s the one given the red jacket and passage off the planet. and she’s the one who always wanted more so he’s not all that unhappy about it anyway — he’s happy to stay at home, really. he is. 

she gives him a hug and says _see you in two months, dingus,_ and he says _love you too, dipshit,_ and then she’s walking up the steps into the ship and that’s the last time he sees her before everything happens and she doesn’t look back. she glances through the window though, and he’s waving. she smiles. 

here she is, staring out the porthole window. 

here he is, swallowed up by the black, by the hunger, here is the boy and there is his flame snuffed out and here is his sister a universe away screaming, because he’s dead, he’s gone, everyone’s dead and her twin brother no longer exists and she can’t believe that the hunger is death sentence because then he’s dead, you see, and who is she without him. 

_we have to go back,_ she says. but they can’t. 

here’s the joke, though, here’s the real joke, after: she cries and she screams and she writes down her memories of him in blank notebooks, after communal grief over the loss of an entire world, after she stops blaming herself for not sneaking him aboard (thats a joke. she never stops blaming herself for that)—

taako comes back. 

here he is, all black starlight void, here’s his space like a hole in the universe because john hunger is not above using all the tools in his toolkit and there’s some sort of beautiful symmetry in him against her, if there’s anything that would turn this lovely flamegirl against hope, if there was anything that would make her despair, its the sight of her brother made puppet. 

john’s wrong though. her anger was always greater than her sadness. 

the parlay parlor has identical silhouettes set against the window. they never play chess. they play cards, mostly. or dice. sometimes he sounds so much like her brother that it hurts. other times its clear that theres is something wrapped around her heart. he always kills her. he never looks happy about it. 

eventually, her husband makes her stop. not makes, asks. 

_its not him,_ barry says. _whoever you’re seeing there, its not the guy you’ve told me so much about. i hate seeing you hurt._

she stops. 

its not like life stopped when he died-assimilated, anyway. lup sees a hundred different worlds, she takes care to remember things because she’s going to tell taako about all of this, one day, because its not a question that she’s going to get him back. she tells her new family about her old one and she knows they would have loved him and he would have loved them, and well, he’s as good as dead but someday he wont be and she has to hang on to that. 

#

after the end of the world, there are identical silhouettes embracing backdropped by the dying sun. 

_two months, huh?_ he says. 

_shut up,_ she says. _i missed you, dipshit._

if theyre both crying, no one calls them out on it. 


End file.
